I’m certain many of your remember the Tenacious D Movie website that Jack Black art-directed. Now he has taken it a step further, rebuilding the Internet.
Be Kind Rewind, his latest film with Mos Def, Danny Glover and directed by Michel Gondry focuses around a man (Jack Black) whose brain becomes magnetized unintentionally and destroys every tape in his friend’s video store. In order to satisfy the store’s most loyal renter, an aging woman with signs of dementia, the two men set out to remake the lost films.
So how do you approach building a website to support the launch of the film (Feb. 22)? Magnetize the Internet, erasing the entire thing and rebuild it the only way you know how.
Everything is fair game: eBay, YouTube, Myspace (MyFace), Flickr, Apple, etc.
Jeffrey Bergmann
Comments
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I’m surprised that Be Kind Rewind decided to totally ignore consumer generated video. Allowing users to create their own video swedes is a perfect fit for this movie.
I appreciate the creativity of the current idea, but why ignore the low-hanging fruit?
Hi Jesse,
The consumer generated video is indeed a large part of the campaign. It lives on the real youtube here:
http://youtube.com/user/BeKindMovie
The entries to the “swede a film” comp have been hilarious! The competition was kick started with a video call to arms from J.Black n M.Gondry themselves.
I have to add that a lot of the user generated stuff has been doen without any incentive from the film.
I have made a list of most of the sweded films online here http://snacked.blogspot.com/2008/02/attempt-to-complete-list-of-sweded.html
its a pretty huge list.
Yeah, the YouTube channel is decent, but I still think Be Kind Rewind could have built out a unique video-driven experience, and used YouTube as an extension rather than a platform. When you have such a strong, uninitialized movement to create suedes, the campaign should feel compelled to go beyond just creating a YouTube channel.
Hey Briggs!
Loving the sweded film list!
A lot of the ’sweded’ fan films are a result of the competition and a lot are as you say generated by the fans just for the sheer fun of it!
Hi Jesse
I guess the advantage of using youtube as a platform is that’s where the eyeballs are and the technical functionality is in place in terms of uploading / moderating / storing / sharing etc.
I’d love to make much more of the success story with the youtube part of the campaign because it’s fun!
The more good people like yourselves blog about them the better !
I’ve also been keeping tabs on some of them but my list falls way shorter than briggs list
http://russtucker.wordpress.com/category/be-kind-rewind/